About this item
Percival Everett's The Trees is a page-turner that opens with a series of brutal murders in the rural town of Money, Mississippi. When a pair of detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation arrive, they meet expected resistance from the local sheriff, his deputy, the coroner, and a string of racist White townsfolk. The murders present a puzzle, for at each crime scene there is a second dead body: that of a man who resembles Emmett Till.The detectives suspect that these are killings of retribution, but soon discover that eerily similar murders are taking place all over the country. Something truly strange is afoot. As the bodies pile up, the MBI detectives seek answers from a local root doctor who has been documenting every lynching in the country for years, uncovering a history that refuses to be buried.
About the Author
Percival L. Everett (born 1956) is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. There might not be a more fertile mind in American fiction today than Everett's. In 22 years, he has written 19 books, including a farcical Western, a savage satire of the publishing industry, a children's story spoofing counting books, retellings of the Greek myths of Medea and Dionysus, and a philosophical tract narrated by a four-year-old. has called Everett "one of the most adventurously experimental of modern American novelists. " And according to , "He's literature's NASCAR champion, going flat out, narrowly avoiding one seemingly inevitable crash only to steer straight for the next. " Everett, who teaches courses in creative writing, American studies and critical theory, says he writes about what interests him, which explains his prolific output and the range of subjects he has tackled. He also describes himself as a demanding teacher who learns from his students as much as they learn from him. Everett's writing has earned him the PEN USA 2006 Literary Award (for his 2005 novel, Wounded) , the Academy Award for Literature of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award (for his 2001 novel, ) , the PEN/Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature (for his 1996 story collection, ) and the New American Writing Award (for his 1990 novel, ) . He has served as a judge for, among others, the 1997 National Book Award for fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1991.
